Fraud charge dropped? The weird case of WPC Suzanne Hall, wife & mother of convicted peregrine launderers.

A fraud charge appears to have dropped against serving police officer Suzanne Hall, the wife and mother of convicted peregrine launderers Timothy and Lewis Hall.

A quick recap.

WPC Hall, 46, initially faced multiple charges in 2022 in relation to the illegal laundering of Scottish peregrines that were stolen from nest sites across the south of Scotland and then sold on for profit to falconers in the Middle East.

The charges were the result of a joint Police Scotland /SSPCA raid at Hall’s property at Lamberton Holdings, Berwickshire, in May 2021 and a subsequent lengthy investigation codenamed Operation Tantallon.

Hall’s husband, Timothy Hall, and son Lewis both pleaded guilty (and received staggeringly inadequate sentences) but WPC Suzanne Hall’s not guilty pleas were accepted by the court in 2023. It was reported that the Crown Office deserted a fraud charge against WPC Hall but reserved the right to re-raise the case at a future date (see here).

News then emerged in the Border Telegraph in July 2024 that WPC Hall was facing a fraud charge relating to almost £10,000 worth of council tax (here). It wasn’t clear whether this was the fraud charge that the Crown Office had previously deserted or another one. Hall denied the allegation and a trial date was set at Jedburgh Sheriff Court for 19 November 2024.

Then in October 2024, after I’d referred in a blog to this forthcoming trial, I started to receive emails from WPC Hall’s convicted husband Timothy Hall, who claimed there were no pending charges against his wife and he accused me of slander, threatening to sue me if I didn’t remove the blog post.

I didn’t bother trying to explain that what I’d written was accurate and fair reporting (based on the information available in the public domain at the time) and nor did I remove the blog post, for the same reason. This seemed to infuriate him and he did his best to write what he probably thought were hard-hitting threats but just sounded like somebody who’d watched too many episodes of Jeremy Kyle:

“My solicitor will be in touch” and “No doubt we will be seeing each other in court, I will be taking this all the way“.

I was curious though, so I contacted the Crown Office for an update on the status of the case against WPC Hall.

COPFS replied by giving me the contact details of Jedburgh Sheriff Court accompanied by a one liner: “They may be able to assist you further with your enquiry“.

So I called Jedburgh Sheriff Court. I was told that the information I sought was covered by the Data Protection Act and was passed on to the Scottish Courts’ media team.

The response I received was this:

“I have searched our court rolls with the information you have provided and I am unable to locate a case with those details“.

Hmm.

My last attempt at trying to verify the status of the case against WPC Hall was today, when I viewed the online court roll for Jedburgh Sheriff Court which provides details of all the criminal cases being heard over the next five days (given that WPC Hall’s trial was scheduled to begin this coming Wednesday).

There is no listing for a case against WPC Hall.

It seems then, that the fraud charge against WPC Hall has either been moved or has been dropped. It’s impossible to determine the outcome, and impossible to know, if the case has been dropped, the reason behind that decision.